The Twenty Years’ Truce
3.4. Civilized Wars
Though World War I saw the Great Powers tear each other to pieces, it failed to diminish their collective dominance over the rest of the world, and after hostilities ended some embers left over from the war were still burning. The Russian Civil War and the Soviet- Polish War together spanned the period 1918–20, and to some extent, the latter was a direct continuation of the former. Early on, the Poles, of whom contemporaries said that “les Polonnais ont devenues des Napoleons,” tried to exploit Russia’s internal di culties by advancing into their eastern neighbor’s territory. They were thrown back almost to the gates of Warsaw, but, risking everything and launching a daring counterattack against the enemy’s rear, they
reasserted themselves at the last moment and in the end succeeded in establishing an independent state that reached far into present- day Belarus and Ukraine.
Both armed con icts were waged almost exclusively on land by fairly large, but also fairly disorganized, armies that in the case of the Russians, had gone through the chaos of revolution, and of the Poles, had to be created almost out of nothing. The most powerful new weapons to emerge from World War I, such as heavy artillery, aircraft, and tanks, saw only extremely limited use; neither was either belligerent nearly up to date in respect to transportation, logistics, and signal communications.
In many ways, these wars were lesser versions of the titanic struggles that had taken place on the Eastern Front in 1914–18. In the broad-open spaces of Russia, the Ukraine, and Poland, old- fashioned cavalry charges were attempted, the riders brandishing their swords or lances and shouting “hurrah,” like something straight out of Tolstoy. Both Poles and Cossacks, after all, had long prided themselves on their prowess as horsemen. The consequences became evident in 1939 when the Poles tried to use horses against the German tanks, and also in 1941 when Stalin’s choice to defend the Ukraine fell on his Civil War–era crony, the cavalryman Semyon Budenny (who even had a breed of horses named after him). Given such primitive tactics, it did not appear as if there was much for the rest of the world to learn from these con icts. The Poles, after all, modeled their army after the former Austrian-Hungarian army and partly after the French. The Soviets struck a course for which there was no precedent and precious little guidance. Many of their commanders were jumped-up corporals with little formal training and even less education. They did not carry rank insignia, but came under the control of political o cers. No wonder that the Soviet system found few admirers and fewer imitators. Even inside the Soviet Union, Sergei Gusev, head of the political directorate of the Red Army, solemnly warned that the new force, “in the form it has currently taken, is powerless against mighty imperialist armies.”42
Unfolding simultaneously with the wars in Eastern Europe were the operations of the German Freikorps. The Freikorps were set up by the ministry of defense in order to carry on the war in the parts of Germany that, according to the Treaty of Versailles, were to be transferred to Poland. In size, they were not impressive. The total number of men who participated at one time or another was no more than two hundred thousand; this, against more than ten times as many soldiers who fought in the Red Army alone. In theory the largest Freikorps unit was the brigade, but in practice most were much smaller. Most were ill organized, and heavy, crew-operated weapons were noted chie y by their absence since the forces rarely possessed what it took to keep them in working order. Still, the Freikorps, perhaps building on the experiences of the Stosstruppen who had broken through the British and French lines in March through July 1918, did set afoot an important innovation.
Traditionally, European armies had selected their o cers from members of the higher classes, the only ones considered loyal to the sovereign, even to the point that the availability of such personnel did as much to govern the size of the prewar German army as any other factor.43 In it and other armies, military discipline was enforced from the top down; indeed, the term Fuehrung itself referred not so much to leadership as to the conduct of operations at all levels.
Though they themselves were veterans of the old imperial army, the o cers who commanded the Freikorps could not operate in the same way. Their troops, instead of being conscripts, were volunteers and stayed with their units only as long as it suited them. Many were rough types who had fought in World War I and found civilian life unattractive; certainly they did not distinguish themselves by following the rules of war. The units operated on a precarious, semi- legal basis, often in lands that had never been part of Germany, such as in the Baltic or else in the provinces that were about to be transferred to Poland under the Treaty of Versailles. Consequently, their commanders had to develop a new form of leadership. It was based less on formal discipline and more on personal in uence or,
to use that much-abused word, charisma—a fact also re ected in their units’ names including Erhardt Brigade, Rossbach Brigade, and the like.44 It is probably no accident that 1922, the year that saw the dissolution of the Freikorps, also saw the publication of a book that extolled the new style of leadership. Its title was Der Feldherr Psychologicus (the psychologist-commander), the author a retired army captain by the name of Dr. Kurt Hesse. The volume quickly turned into a national best seller; here, indeed, were the seeds of the future.
Later, some former Freikorps personnel were taken into the new Reichswehr. Others ended up in the armed formations of the Nazi Party,45 where they could give free reign to their anti-Semitism and tendency toward rowdiness. The Nazi regime itself proclaimed its adherence to the so-called Fuehrerprinzip, leadership principle. At the same time, it was in some ways anti-authoritarian, insisting on the Volksge-meinschaft, or people’s community, at the expense of the old, class-bound traditions. As noted by the American war correspondent William Shirer in the heady days immediately after the fall of France: “There is a sort of equalitarianism…. The German o cer no longer represents … a class or caste…. They fell like members of one great family … in cafes, restaurants, dining cars, o cers and men o duty sit at the same table and converse as men to men.”46 Thus, paradoxically, the one country that exchanged the strongest authoritarian tradition for one of the most totalitarian regimes also developed a novel, quasi-democratic style of leadership
—one that, when combined with “the old Prussian goose step, the heel clicking, the ‘Jawohl!’ of the private when answering an o cer” (Shirer again), was to make its power felt in ways that made the world hold its breath.
As the various peace treaties came into e ect, Europe nally calmed down. The next war on the Continent wouldn’t begin until 1936, and it was not an international con ict but an internal one fought with some external support. The Spanish Republic was but ve years old when Francisco Franco, the youngest general in the
Spanish army, led his colonial troops in a revolt against the elected, left-wing government that had just taken power in Madrid. Italian aircraft were sent in and ew some of Franco’s advance units from Spanish Africa to the homeland, the rst operation of its kind.
Franco’s hopes for a rapid victory did not materialize, however, and soon enough the two sides were engaged in a massive civil war in which entire Italian and German units, as well as organized and disorganized volunteers from many countries, also participated.
Geographic conditions dictated that the war would be fought not on one front but on several simultaneously. Most of the time, this fact prevented the forces on either side from being used en masse, creating vast gaps that were almost entirely unoccupied. By Great Power standards, the number of troops involved was not very large;
nor did Spain, at that time a semi-developed country, have the industrial-logistical infrastructure that modern armed con ict requires. Practically every heavy weapon and motor vehicle, as well as most of the spare parts they required, had to be imported. For these reasons, most operations in Spain could not bear comparison to what occurred in World War I, let alone what actually took place in World War II. Yet the timing of the con ict, and the appearance of weapons from the newly militarized Nazi Germany, meant the war would be intensely studied by the future belligerent nations.
This was particularly true in respect to those twin new instruments of war, armor and airpower, although the attempt to use tanks turned out to be a disaster. On the republican side, coordination between the Russian crews and the Spanish and international infantry they supported proved very di cult. The fact that the crews themselves were insu ciently trained didn’t help matters. A proper organization, a proper infrastructure, and a proper doctrine were all lacking.47 As a result, the Soviet armored forces, instead of being formed into independent units, were reincorporated with the infantry,”8 su ering a setback that was to cost them dearly when the Germans invaded in 1941.
On Franco’s side, tanks were operated by the Italians, who would establish here their reputation for battle eld timidity. Air operations were largely conducted by the German Condor Legion with its ve thousand men and one hundred aircraft, on the one hand and Soviet aircraft, own by Soviet volunteers (but not organized as a separate Soviet unit), on the other. On the whole, the Germans, whose aircraft were superior, emerged victorious. Thus the freshly minted Luftwa e was able to gain experience on almost every kind of mission, from reconnaissance and air-to-air combat to close support and interdiction, and even “strategic” bombardment.49 Returning home, the personnel were used as instructors to teach what they had learned.
Apart from the use of amphibious operations, the Sino-Japanese War had little of interest to o er the military specialist.50 While it is true that the Japanese set an example by using their airpower to bomb China’s coastal cities, their operations went largely unopposed. The con ict that took place farther north, in Manchuria, was another matter. Throughout the second half of the 1930s, the Japanese leaders had been divided as to the direction in which their country should expand. The generals pressed for Northeast Asia.
Opposing them, the admirals preferred to go in the opposite direction: the American-occupied Philippines and the rich colonial possessions of Britain, France, and the Netherlands. In the spring of 1939, it was the generals who, at least for a time, gained the upper hand.
Border clashes between Soviet forces and the Japanese in Manchuria multiplied, culminating in a full-scale battle at Khalkin Gol. The Soviet commander on the spot was a general named Georgy Zhukov. From a shoemaker’s apprentice, he had made his way to the top—a feat almost entirely inconceivable in any other army at the time. With seventy thousand men, an armored brigade (which he employed as a concentrated force against the dispersed enemy tanks), and several hundred aircraft, he in icted a crushing defeat on forty thousand Japanese troops. Tokyo was compelled to abandon its plans in Northeast Asia and redirect its e orts to the
south, as the navy had demanded. In April 1941, it even signed a nonaggression treaty with the USSR, ensuring that the latter had its rear covered when the Germans invaded just two months later.51
Finally, the last “civilized” con ict, fought even while World War II was gathering steam, was the Russo-Finnish War.52 It began when Stalin, aware that Hitler would attack him sooner or later and worried about how close Leningrad was to the Finnish border, demanded that the Finns make territorial concessions. When these were refused, he sent in his air force, bombing Helsinki and other targets but failing to get the results that Douhet had predicted and Guernica seemed to prove.
For four months the Finns fought on in the snow, using skis to maneuver and silently surround and eliminate Red Army infantry columns. So e ective, incidentally, was the assistance that the Finnish troops received from the Lottas Women’s Organization that Hitler later summoned its commander to Berlin and presented her with a medal.53 Although, in the end, the Finns were forced to surrender, the impression left by the Red Army was of a blunt instrument, incompetently commanded. That impression, in turn, played a role in Hitler’s decision to invade the USSR a little more than a year after the so-called Winter War had ended.
Compared with what had taken place in 1914–18 and what was about to take place in 1939–45, the “civilized” wars during the twenty years’ truce were neither large nor militarily signi cant, though this was scant consolation to masses of people who su ered through them. Only in the case of Khalkin Gol did two Great Powers ght each other, and they did so while committing only a small part of their main forces, operating at the end of extremely long lines of communication far from the centers of national power. It therefore required uncommon foresight to realize that, out of the small and fragmented operations of the Freikorps, a new and revolutionary style of military leadership would be born. And whereas the Spanish Civil War provided the Germans in particular with many valuable lessons concerning the conduct of air operations in particular, the
importance of Khalkin Gol was overlooked by the rest of the world
—which came to judge the Red Army only by its poor performance in the war against Finland—and by the Soviets themselves. When the time to ght the Germans came, they were not ready.